Quicken 2009 loses keyboard focus on register entry

Anyone have this problem? Quicken 2009 Home and Business (latest version) loses keyboard focus after I press RETURN after entering a new record in the register.

This has never happened before in any version of Quicken I've used but this one. I have the latest updates to Quicken, and this is happening... very very disconcerting. I'm entering a list of transactions, but after each one I lose keyboard focus and have to focus again using the mouse.

Really sucks.

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay
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If you don't find a solution elsewhere, try Flywheel. It solved a different problem for me, and it's free (read the last part of the article).

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Reply to
Jim Jensen

Just looked at that... not sure how that would have any effect here. The mouse is not involved in navigation in this case, and certainly not the mouse wheel. I'm just pressing the return key.

How are you supposing the two might be related?

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

It was just a long shot, something to try if all else failed, but you are probably right.

In q2007, under Edit>Preferences>Quicken Program>QuickFill, there is a setting - "use enter key to move between fields". Do you have that in q2009? Is it checked?

Reply to
Jim Jensen

Oh well, thanks for the suggestion anyway. :-)

Nope, not checked - I use ENTER to go to the next entry. I could check it and see if using some other key-combo to go to the next entry... is there any key combo you know besides ENTER to go to the next entry/begin a new entry? Hitting ctrl-N for 'new entry' brings up the dialog to ask if I want to save the last one, which is also not what I want. I just want the usual behavior of "finish this entry/start the next one" that ENTER provides. I doubt that another key to accomplish that would fix the focus problem tho'.

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

Can you determine where the focus is going? To MS Outlook, or to an anti-virus app possibly?

Did the problem happen before you updated to R2?

I too am just taking a stab in the dark here, but the R2 release introduced a new Quicken feature: the ability to synchronize your Scheduled Transaction reminders with the MS Outlook Calendar.

I think I read a post or two about something similar to what you're experiencing, where users felt like their anti-virus software was trying to do something while they were using Quicken. I don't remember the details, so I am really guessing about your situation is related to their complaint.

Reply to
John Pollard

The frame of the Quicken window is still focused, so I assume it's going to the frame itself. If I click on the account's tab itself, focus returns to the next entry, as it had in the past. So I think it's internal to Quicken.

I don't remember it happening before R2, so I think it's been introduced in this release.

Hmm... well, I had disabled my anti-virus software to test this already, and it didn't make any difference. I'll try a few more tests to check. Thanks for the suggestions!

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

Nope, nothing worked. :-(

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

This explantion is incomprehesible.

Reply to
John Pollard

This comment is incomprehsible.

Either the focus shifts somewhere else ... or it doesn't.

Where does it shift to?

Reply to
John Pollard

Sorry if you couldn't comprehend it. :-)

  1. I mouse-click on a new register record: Keyboard Focus goes to 1st field
  2. I tab through the fields, entering data in them: Keyboard Focus changes to each field in turn
  3. I press Return/Enter: Keyboard Focus changes to 1st field in next (new) record
  4. Keyboard Focus immediately LEAVES 1st field in next record.

Quicken frame remains in the foreground (i.e. it is the "focused window, and receives keyboard events). HOWEVER, NO COMPONENT WITHIN THE FRAME HAS KEYBOARD FOCUS. The window responds to Alt-[key] events, but no individual component contained in the Frame responds to keyboard events.

Have you ever written GUI's? Keyboard focus follows various models, but in general, keyboard events are targeted at a focused component (button, panel, dropdown, etc.). If they are not handled by that component, they can be swallowed/ignored by that component, or they can bubble up through component hierarchy until they reach the top-level component, which is usually the Frame (at least it is in the Java Swing/AWT model, which I am guessing is similar to the toolkit Quicken uses in its keyboard event model... I surely could be wrong about that).

Does that clarify it for you?

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

Yes.

That is not what I believed to be the meaning of the word "focus" (I understood it to refer to an application - or it's window - not to fields within an application). But if you say that is how the word is used, I'll take your word for it.

Have you seen this in multiple accounts? Multiple account types? What happens when you click the "Enter" button?

I think the behavior you're seeing is quite uncommon, but a quick check turned up one thread in the Quicken Forums whose OP described something like this. Unfortunately there is little insight in that post, and only one other poster reported having the same experience. One possibly useful piece of info is that one of the posters was using Vista, the other using XP; so it doesn't appear to be os related.

You can determine whether it is a characteristic of R2 and possibly determine if you have a corrupted installation, by re-installing to R1, seeing if the problem occurs there, then upgrading to R2 to see if the problem starts with that release, or perhaps disappears, indicating a corrupted installation.

[I have Q2009 RPM R2 and I have not seen your problem with R1 or R2.]
Reply to
John Pollard

If you mean the "Enter" button widget on the screen, yes, I've tried that, same thing happens. :-( And it happens in all accounts.

Thanks again for the suggestions; well, I'll take a look at those forums you mention (hadn't tried there *sheepish grin*); my last resort will be to try uninstall/reinstall. Hate that. :-)

- Tim

Reply to
Spammay Blockay

abrown_151 had written this in response to

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: I had the same problem with Quicken Home & Business 2009 - after entering a transaction, the date in the following line is briefly highlighted, then the keyboard focus basically seems to go NOWHERE. Perhaps it's the Quicken window itself (probably what Spammay Blockay meant by the "frame").

The problem appears to be caused by something in the "Setup" tab. If that's your default startup page, change it to something else:

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Quicken Program -> Startup. Under Startup preferences change "on startup open to:" to something other than "setup". That fixed the problem for me and several other people.

However, if you go to the "Setup" tab at any time during your session, the problem will come back. (Just exit Quicken and launch it again to fix the problem.)

------------------------------------- John Pollard wrote:

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Reply to
abrown_151

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